Representing Agrippina

Agrippina the Younger ranks as one of the most powerful women in the history of the Roman empire. Judith Ginsburg's book provides a fresh look at both the literary and material representations of Agrippina. Her incisive study exposes both the contrivances of the commissioned artists whose idealized portraits served to buttress the image of the regime and the contrasting designs of the historians whose rhetorical stereotypes and negative depictions aimed to undermine it.

Judith Ginsburg, 1944-2002, was Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University. Eric S. Gruen is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley